24.2.09

Zhuhai - A green city in China

Recently we stumbled upon a really interesting article from Efficiency Freak regarding the efforts of Zhuhai, a city with its very own international airport and a formula one track, only an hour away from the cosmopolitan Hong Kong.

Welcome to Zhuhai, a city full of all the madness of modern China, and some of the hopes.

Zhuhai was what China cliche-lovers would call a “sleepy fishing village” (it had the same population as Oxford) before it had the fortune to be chosen as one of the special economic zones in the early 1980s.

Its incredible mayor, Liang Guangda, wanted to create a city unlike the get-polluted-and-rich-quick model, he wanted Zhuhai to become a serious international city, so he encouraged universities to open franchises here.

He also built great parks, a golf course, the international airport and the formula one track (but he annoyed Beijing in the process, so the last two are hardly ever used).

The city is, by Chinese standards, beautiful with tree-lined avenues and an incredible sea-front, which puts Hong Kong’s dire efforts to shame.

He shunned much of the low-budget filth-spewing factories that ruin southern China’s air quality and insisted on top notch computer companies which would encourage the city’s graduates from the six universities — the campuses of which are located in an incredible mountain setting — to stay and develop the city. And so the air is far cleaner than its near neighbours. However, there are signs that some of this good work is being undone and the city is becoming more famous as a seedy tourist destination and is also getting ready for the futile Zhuhai-Macau-HongKong bridge.

But his example shows, as ever, that brave visionaries can make an enormous difference. The city is far from an eco-model, but it beats the filthy skies of Dongguan and the pipe dreams of grandiose publicity schemes such as Dongtan.